Western Political Science Association 2014 Meeting

Western Political Science Association 2014 Meeting

Framing Dissent: How The New York Times' Framed Occupy Wall Street

Julian Gottlieb[1]

Abstract:

This paper examines the news coverage of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. It asks t he following questions. Did The New York Times highlig ht Occupy Wall Street ’ s main concerns and grievances about economic inequality and the financial crisis? How did journalists balance their attention to the substance of the movement with the conflict that emerged between city governments and protesters ? Were news stories about substance and conflict likely to emerge at different times during the protest? To answer these questions, I conduct ed a content analysis of articles in The New York Times during the early and late stages of the protest from September 17 th , 2011 to November 30, 2011 of 179 articles . The results su ggest that mass arrests during the movement ’s early mobilization phase slowly captured the attention of journalists , but then the newspaper followed the clash between police and protesters quite closely, especially as the movement declined and faced threats of eviction . The results also demonstrate how news framing opportunities changed as the movement reached different stages of the issue attention cycle. In the early stages of the protest, as the movement grew exponentially , journalists focused on the movement’s economic grievances and the potential political soluti ons to economic inequality and unscrupulous behavior by major financial institutions . However, as the movement peaked, news attention and public interest shifted to the intensifying conflict between city officials and police on one side, and protesters on the other. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a protest ’s organizational features might condition the amount and length of attentio n to the cause of the movement as well as protest strategies that can emerge after news organizations abandon the protesters’ preferred narratives about their message and cause.

Introduction

When The New York Times dedicates extensive coverage to a social movement, it signals the national and often, international importance of that movement. The Gray Lady is the empress of the American newspaper business, widely considered the paper of record in the United States. For the most part, organizations that reach the front page of the Times, have asserted a commanding dominance over the national news agenda. A social movement that wants to captivate The New York Times must demonstrate a potential to shake up the existing political or economic order, dedication, persistence, and seriousness of purpose. In other words, The Times’ journalists would likely ignore the cause of a ragtag smattering of unorganized activists railing against some obscure injustice. Enter Occupy Wall Street.

Though often displaying a considerable amount of dysfunction and a lack of coordination, The Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS hereafter) developed an unconventional, yet ambitious and incendiary political and economic reform agenda, including themes such as reducing economic inequality, taxing the rich, breaking up the big banks and financial institutions, and auditing or abolishing the Federal Reserve to mention a few. Its participants were as diverse as their demands and goals for the movement. Many of the Occupiers were engaging in politics and protest for the first time, an indication that disillusionment and disappointment with a previous generation of unsuccessful anti-war and anti-globalization protests had opened the way for inclusion, opportunity, renewal and hope.

At a glance, OWS offered a refreshing blend of novelty, boldness, provocation, and fierce contentiousness that had long been dormant in American protest movements. With a flexible organizational capacity to organize protest events spontaneously and inexpensively, OWS spread its reach both nationally and globally within its first two weeks of activity. Broad swaths of the American public; rural and urban; liberal and conservative; anarchists, libertarians, hippies, stock traders, anthropology graduate students, non-college educated unionized laborers, rappers, and folk singers took notice of the movement’s diffusion with social media buzz, dinner table chats and water cooler talk about the vibrant protests and the grievances of protesters: rising economic inequality, financial institutions run amok, and the corrupting influence of money on our political processes.

As the public grew keener to the audacious and inflammatory dialogue of the protesters, elites soon ratcheted up their rhetoric and further incited the movement’s fury with heated, visceral responses from pundits and politicians of all political persuasions about the legitimacy of the protesters’ grievances, their right to pitch tents in the middle of bustling urban cities, the squalor and filth in which the protesters lived, and the appropriate role of the police in maintaining law and order at the protests. Perhaps most importantly of all, the timing of the movement could not have been better. The protests were coalescing amidst unprecedented levels of economic inequality, exacerbated by the worst financial meltdown since The Great Depression, and a growing sense of disenchantment concerning the performance and responsiveness of the dominant political parties. The movement’s innovative tactics, rapid diffusion, powerful public and elite response, and brilliant timing all indicate OWS would be a particularly fascinating and attractive story for The Times’ reporters to dissect, interpret, and tell.

As if all these factors could not possibly resonate enough with journalists at The Times, there is also the factor of geographic convenience. The New York Times building is located just 3.5 miles from Zuccotti Park, a short fifteen-minute taxi ride away from where the Occupy Movement originated and held its headquarters. In the end, reporters at The New York Times did not have a good excuse to avoid at least poking around at the protest encampment.

Consequently, OWS did prove to be a gripping story and The New York Times devoted a substantial amount of its coverage to telling the story of the protest. This study examines how we can best make sense of The New York Times portrayal of Occupy Wall Street. It asks the following questions. Did the Times’ journalists highlight Occupy Wall Street protesters’ main issues and grievances about economic inequality and the financial crisis? How did journalists balance their attention to the substance of the movement with the conflict? Were news stories about substance and conflict likely to emerge at different times throughout the duration of the protest? This paper proceeds as follows.

First, I present the key theoretical concepts that help me interpret news and the Occupy movement. This includes work on journalistic norms, news routines, and media framing of protests which lead me to expect to find professional news outlets increased their attention to OWS after the conflict with city officials heightened and a dramatic surge in protester arrests took place.

Second, I present Anthony Downs’ (1972) issue attention cycle, which leads me to expect professional news outlets would adopt economic frames as the movement increased in size and peaked, followed by conflict frames as the movement failed to realize its goals and faced more resistance from city governments and police to clear their encampments. Following this theoretical exploration of Occupy Wall Street’s relationship to the news media, I describe the methods I used to test my expectations, which involve content analysis of New York Times articles.

In the results section, I present my findings, which show that mass arrests at the outset of the movement slowly captured the attention of The New York Times, but then the newspaper followed the clash between police and protesters quite closely, especially as the movement declined and faced threats of eviction and increasing arrests. The results also demonstrate how news framing opportunities changed as the movement reached different stages of the issue attention cycle. In the early stages of the protest, particularly as the movement was growing in size, journalists focused on the movement’s economic grievances and the potential solutions to economic inequality and a seemingly rigged financial system. However, as the movement peaked and failed to actualize specific goals and demands, news attention and public interest shifted to the intensifying conflict between city officials and police on one side, and protesters on the other. As winter approached, and the protest camps were cleared, news attention gradually dissipated altogether.

The results echo previous findings that protesters have a very narrow window of time to actualize demands and realize their goals before the public and officials get frustrated, hostile, bored, or all of the above. In the context of Occupy Movement, the daunting, nearly intractable, and sprawling challenges of reducing economic inequality or achieving reforms in the financial sector may have exacerbated the movement’s inability to sustain public interest and realize significant progress. The implications of this are explored further in the conclusion.

Theoretical Issues

Journalistic Norms and Routines

Scholars have noted that depictions of social movements in the news are for the most part, guided by journalists’ professional norms, rules, and values (Boykoff 2006; Oliver and Maney 2000; Shoemaker and Resse 1991). For example, the size and disruptiveness of a protest increases the probability of news coverage, as well as the proximity of the news event to the news organization (Oliver and Myers 2003; McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996; Mueller 1997). Most protests do not receive extensive coverage until they mobilize many participants. Though the Occupy Movement was relatively tame in the first week of mobilization, with just a few dozen protesters; the protest eventually grew in size and disruptiveness. By early October, thousands of protesters had converged into a formidable presence.

In addition to the size of a movement, which is often difficult to quantify at protests, studies have documented that news organizations are attracted to protests because of the news value of conflict or controversy (Oliver and Myers, 1999; Oliver and Maney, 2000). Accordingly, there was plenty of tension between local governments and the Occupy encampments that spanned the country, which journalists could easily package into dramatic, episodic stories about the protest. The conflict was relatively easy to quantify, at least in terms of protester arrests. At the beginning of October, over 700 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge, drawing considerable media attention and catapulting the movement into the national spotlight. Headlines like “Some Cities Begin Cracking Down on ‘Occupy’ Protests”, “Across U.S., Demonstrators Face Arrests and Evictions”, and “200 Are Arrested as Protesters Clash with the Police” signal the strong newspaper focus on conflict between city officials and protesters (McKinley and Goodnough, 2011; Foderaro, 2011; Buckley, 2011).

The New York Times noted that the protesters’ conflict with city officials and police treatment of the protesters likely helped fuel more media attention. In a self-reflexive article, Times writer Brian Stelter said, “Press coverage, minimal in the first days of the occupation in New York, picked up after amateur video surfaced online showing a police officer using pepper spray on protesters. On several occasions, video of confrontations with the police, often filmed by the protesters, has propelled television coverage” (Stelter 2011). Given journalists’ propensity to cover protests that are large and disruptive, as well as the news media’s tendency for conflict framing, and the dramatic nature of clashes between Occupy protesters and police, there is a compelling reason to believe that conflict, in the form of protester arrests, drove the amount of Occupy related coverage. This leads to my first hypothesis:

H1: Variation in the frequency of OWS stories was driven by variation in the number of arrests over time.

Framing of Protest Movements

The representation of protesters’ grievances in the news media can determine whether a protest is successful at raising consciousness about a political problem and subsequently, mobilizing people to seek remedies (Cottle, 2008). The frames journalists use to organize news stories exert a strong influence on how the public perceives the issues and parties involved in a conflict, especially perceptions of the protesters (Boyle et al. 2012; McLeod and Detenber, 1999). Taken together, the literature suggests successful protests likely exhibit a strong capacity to engage the broader public by actively seeking a positive representation in the news. In other words, protests mobilize support by getting news organizations and ultimately the public to adopt their preferred framing.

Consequently, a variety of studies have documented news media frames that are likely to appear in protest coverage, including depictions of the substantive matters, especially the grievances of protesters (Boykoff, 2006; Harlow and Johnson, 2011), and frames emphasizing the conflict between protesters and institutional actors (Gamson and Wolsfeld, 1993; Boyle et al. 2005; Oliver and Maney, 2000; Oliver and Myers, 1999). In the case of OWS, there was an abundance of opportunities for these two types of frames: about the substance of the movement, more specifically, the economic grievances of protesters; and as previously mentioned, about the conflict between police and city officials on one hand and the protesters at the Occupy encampments on the other.

In terms of framing the substance of the movement, economic concerns were the prevailing common thread among the principal grievances of the protesters. There was a consistent, though often complicated and unfocused concern with economic inequality. While the scope of concerns about inequality was broad and vague, it was exemplified by the protesters’ “99% meme”. This shrewd framing of economic inequality led many pundits to magnify attention to the topic. As economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it, “Inequality is back in the news, thanks largely to Occupy Wall Street” (Krugman, 2011b). The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism observed the economy reclaimed its place atop of the news agenda in the first week of October 2011 due to a dramatic increase in attention to the OWS demonstrations (Holcomb, 2011).

While economic inequality was a central message of the protesters, their economic concerns reach beyond one single issue. Some protesters focused more on Wall St. greed and the bailouts; others on financial deregulation; some on unemployment and the lack of job opportunities for young people; and many simply exhibited a general hopelessness about the way capitalism works. The broad and evolving scope of economic concerns ironically provided many alternative approaches to news story telling but at the same time proved difficult for journalists to decipher. A New York Times headline signals this challenge for journalists: “Countless Grievances, One Thread: We’re Angry” (Lacey, 2011).